Prisons are 'new asylums' in U.S.

Thursday

Apr 10, 2014 at 12:01 AMApr 10, 2014 at 9:38 AM

Reinforcing their role as the "new asylums," U.S. prisons now house 10 times as many seriously mentally ill people as state psychiatric hospitals do, a new national report shows. An estimated 356,268 seriously mentally ill inmates were housed in prisons and jails nationally in 2012, compared with about 35,000 patients in mental hospitals, according to a report released Tuesday.

Alan Johnson, The Columbus Dispatch

Reinforcing their role as the “new asylums,” U.S. prisons now house 10 times as many seriously mentally ill people as state psychiatric hospitals do, a new national report shows.

An estimated 356,268 seriously mentally ill inmates were housed in prisons and jails nationally in 2012, compared with about 35,000 patients in mental hospitals, according to a report released Tuesday. The Virginia-based Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Sheriffs’ Association released “Treatment of Persons with Mental Illness in Prisons and Jails: A State Survey.”

In Ohio, nearly 10,000 inmates are on the mental-health caseload in state prisons, with 4,356 of them seriously mentally ill. Fewer than 1,000 patients reside in six state psychiatric hospitals. The largest hospital, Summit Behavioral Healthcare in Cincinnati, had 274 patients this week.

The state prison numbers do not include jails, the largest of which, Franklin County (2,200 inmates) and Cuyahoga County (1,765) “may each hold more individuals with serious mental illnesses than the state hospital does,” the report said.

Roughly 20 percent of the state prison population has mental illness, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction calculates.

Behavioral-health experts say prisons and jails were not designed and are not equipped and staffed to handle the huge influx of inmates with mental illness. Yet, that’s where many mentally ill individuals end up as a result of the closing of psychiatric hospitals and cutbacks to community treatment and shelter programs.

Terry Russell, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Ohio, a veteran leader of the mental-health system, said he finds the idea of further stigmatizing the mentally ill by locking them in prison “repulsive.”

“The biggest problem with our mental-health system is the local community does not have the tools to treat these people effectively so they don’t get in harm’s way and end up in prison,” he said. “We see time and time again that there is a need for very ill people to get care immediately. The sickest of the sick just aren’t getting treatment.”

State prisons spokeswoman JoEllen Smith said the agency copes with the huge population of inmates with mental-health issues by doing extensive health screenings when they enter prison, providing treatment programs in four prisons, and offering psychotropic medication management and counseling for inmates who are leaving prison.